The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation

The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation perpetuates the vision of Anni and Josef Albers through exhibitions, publications, education, and outreach concomitant with the Alberses’ personal values. The aim of the Foundation, as established by the Alberses in 1972, is “the revelation and evocation of vision through art”.

Josef Albers devoted much of his research to the interaction of colours, studying their variations through rigorous and repetitive geometric structures. According to the artist, colour is never isolated, but lives and changes in relation to its context. The whole is greater than the sum of its individual parts, because these, in dialogue with one another, generate unexpected effects.

“In mathematics, one plus one plus one equals three, but in art it equals three or more.”

Josef Albers (1888–1976) was one of the most influ-ential abstract painters and art teachers of the twen-tieth century. Albers’s artistic career, which bridged European and American Modernism, consisted mainly of a tightly focused investigation into the perceptual properties of colour and spatial relationships.

Albers was born in Bottrop, Germany, and studied briefly at the Königliche Bayerische Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Munich, in 1919, before becoming a student at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920. The Alberses in 1950 moved to New Haven, Connecti-cut, where Josef Albers was invited to direct a newly formed department of design at the Yale University School of Art. In 1950, too, he developed what would become his seminal Homage to the Square series, which he continued to elaborate until his death in 1976.

Following numerous gallery and museum exhibitions, as well as his participation in Documenta I (1955) and Documenta 4 (1968), Albers became the first living artist to be the subject of a solo exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, with his career-spanning retrospective there in 1971. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation has been exclusively represented by David Zwirner since 2016. Work by Albers is held in important public and private collections worldwide.